About Author: Chris Edley, III

When I sipped my free Patron and Toby had his own in hand, I swiveled back around the gift suite and saw that Justin had donned the silk starburst slacks the Norse guys gave him, that they were perfect with his gold-embroidered “The Woods” neon parka, his killer blade shades, his general state of is-ness. Like a Kandinsky portrait of a hipster. Someone gave me a bio-degradable watch and I wound up furious at the idea, boiling it the next night in a verbosely drunk and expansively stoned condominium ritual.

After five days the hot tub was gunked up and we had an exact count of the long stairs leading from our place down to Main Street, where all the action was, and where I’d told everyone to come enjoy our hot tub, our free Oregon wine, our unbelievable posse. When I finally got on the bus to the train to come home, I realized that everyone must have had their own hot tubs, and the worming anxiety of some important producer or director or pretty girl or amalgam of the three saying, “Hey, how bout yer hot tub right now?” had been baseless. “How about YOUR hot tub? There’s so many stairs to get to mine.”

I opted out of going with the rest of the cast and crew to a daytime screening in Salt Lake and our PR lady was little miffed. But then I told her I needed the day to get ready to open for a semi-famous hip-hop act that night, and she was pretty psyched. I got them to talk about the movie and how great it is from the stage, even though they hadn’t seen it, and the audience seemed almost as psyched as our PR lady.

People were introduced as a “great this” or an “amazing that” by plainly new acquaintances, ones who may or may not have any familiarity with the introduced’s work. “Yeah, no, you should really meet the guy cuz he’s wonderful and maybe has a similar sort of aesthetic vibe as you and your guys, yeah you should talk, you’ll get each other.” People are very nice, but how do we stand face to face and talk about the invisible things we’ve made, what we might like to make in the future? Here goes.

Actually, the director of my movie, Matthew Lessner, and I met about that way at South By Southwest three years ago. We started talking because we were dressed a touch funny and someone introduced us softly. It turned out Matthew had enjoyed some music videos I’d art directed and I liked the ideas he had about the movie he wanted to make. We took in some barbecue and wine at the New Zealand music showcase. Then, suddenly, I wanted to make the movie too. A few months later my girlfriend had dumped me and all the people who would come to gunk up the hot tub three years later went camping for a month on a fire-road outside Roseburg, Oregon. We shot a moderately scripted and deeply underfunded feature film.

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